Cabaret can be a risky business at the best of times, attempting as it does to juggle song, stand up comedy, instrumental music and repartee before an audience of mixed tastes and temperaments. Factor in a working church as a venue and pare it down to a one man show and it becomes analogous to tightrope walking across Niagara Falls juggling an assortment of heavy duty household appliances. Bob Eagle, performing to a packed Church of the Wisdom of God on the evening of 5 March, took on the challenge and ended the evening triumphant, having carried his audience all the way with him. Bob's repertoire ranged from 'Singing in the Rain', covers of Sinatra's best loved songs, spirituals and those old Sunday school songs, the actions to which our Sunday teachers had indelibly etched upon our memories… and remember them we did! Providing his own accompaniment, either on the piano or electronic recording with a deftness to be admired, Bob was not about to let his audience sit back in passive appreciation: we were part of the show; he made us work for our entertainment and we loved it. Having directed a choir of a thousand voices at the Royal Albert Hall, it was, perhaps little surprise that be knew exactly how to make us perform. In a church miraculously transformed into a nightclub, (and disposing of seventy chairs in the Lady Chapel of the Wisdom is, after all, close to a miracle), Bob, who was for 26 years accompanist to the London Emmanuel Choir delighted us with some witty variations on Rachmaninov, the ease and good humour with which they were played utterly understating his skill and musicianship. If the transition from church to nightclub was so complete as to make me mischievously speculate on the humorous effect of erecting a sign outside the Wisdom saying "Mecca", then Bob's show, so full of gentle and thought provoking wit and élan, offered a similar meeting of the sacred and the secular. Such meetings are not to be taken lightly for they knit up the ravelled ends of our faith and a world which would often pretend to be meaningful in its absence. Would that we were always reminded so happily of the interdependence of the two. Ron Searle reprinted, with kind permission, from the Wisdom of God Church Parish Magazine